“Oh, you are always so serious, Étienne,” a woman’s voice said. “Wasting this splendid golden creature on mere breeding when she is obviously meant for pleasure!”
Seraphine Brézé’s natural appearance-insofar as the term had any meaning with a post-corporeal-would have been very much like Adrian or his sister. Today she was wearing one of her victims, a petite Asian woman in a tight sheath crimson áo dài, slit nearly to the waist at the sides over some sort of hose and jeweled slippers. She had acquired it during the French conquest of Indochina, an after-dinner story of which she was fond. Her piled hair was secured by long golden pins whose ends were wrought into Art Nouveau butterflies by Lalique. She took her spouse’s arm and smiled at them:
“Such a fascinating mind…it would be a pity not to kill her, a wonderful project spanning years, spanning circle upon descending circle of horror and pain, spiritual and physical torment and degradation complementing each other. Only a great soul is capable of a really satisfying despair, which adds so much to the experience…”
“My dear, you paint an enchanting picture, but perhaps another time?”
The doll-like face smiled at Ellen impishly. “They can be such…such grim puritans, the men, can they not?”
Ellen contented herself with another curtsey, and they moved ahead to let the next in line follow.
“You know,” she said when they were hopefully out of earshot, “this assumption that I’d be a party pooper not to appreciate the grand fun of my own slow-tortured demise gets really old, quickly. She isn’t the first Shadowspawn to suggest it, either.”
“Even humans are prone to solipsism,” Adrian replied. “Imagine being a thing of murderous power and darkness and unfettered will for generation after generation…”
“I’d rather not,” she said. Then, dropping into English because there were things you just had to say in your native tongue: “I’m not one to insist on vanilla heteronormativity. But why does coming into contact with this bunch make me feel I should be wearing a whole-body condom?”
“I presume that is a rhetorical question? The answer being because they are vile, degenerate and evil?”
“Yup, pretty much. What next?”
“My great-grandfather will want to torment us by delay, of course,” Adrian said matter-of-factly. “And indeed with this Council meeting coming up-the first full gathering in decades-he will be very busy.”
“Why Tbilisi, by the way? Why not here in Paris?”
“Two reasons. First, paleontologists working for the Council determined back in the 20s of the last century that the Shadowspawn probably evolved in the Caucasus late during the Riss glacial period, trapped in a little pocket by the ice. They escaped and overran the planet during the Riss-Würm interglacial, when the warmth returned.”
“Some Empire of Shadow, putting the bite on lice-crawling cavemen and Neanderthals and those little hobbit thingies out in Indonesia.”
Adrian shrugged. “The Order of the Black Dawn were depraved Satanists, but they were also Victorian romantics and loved dramatic grandiose titles and dressing up in elaborate costumes, imposing their own concepts upon the past. They thought of it as the French or British empires of their time, or those of Rome and Greece they had studied at school. Only more evil, with Wreaking, prehistoric beasts, better clothes and run by themselves.”
“Great, Sir Walter Scott and Quo Vadis with magic powers and all done to an obbligato composed by demons.”
Adrian nodded. “And so the meeting is a return to where we began.”
“Oh, sort of a ‘roots’ thing.”
“And…would you want this assembly of devils in your backyard any longer than you must, even if you were the arch-devil? In the meantime, we should circulate.”
“Mill-and-swill at the serial killer’s convention,” Ellen said hollowly. “Joy.”
He looked around and hissed slightly in anger, drawing a few dark looks or sets of bared teeth. Occasionally his body-language reminded you that he might think of himself as a human being, but his genes were another matter.
“I have never been in a single building with this many adepts present, all tangling the world-lines. It’s like being blind. I dare not extend my senses! There are reasons Shadowspawn are not gregarious with their own kind.”
“Yeah, you sort of cancel each other out.”
Inwardly she shivered. In a way-several ways-outright fighting the Shadowspawn would be easier than socializing with them. More terrifying, more dangerous, but less…
Gruesome, she decided. Not least because if you’re fighting them, you don’t have to acknowledge they rule the planet, and don’t run it only because then they’d have to work too hard, reading reports and going to meetings, and they don’t do that because they’re lazy. The Brotherhood’s la resistance and not a very strong example of the type, either. Great-granddaddy back there is the Emperor of the World, or near as no matter, as long as he doesn’t use the power so much it’s obvious. And they’re planning to remove that limit too.
The interior of the Hôtel was more or less standard Rococo, if of high standards. The gathering was a substantial one. Not only were many adepts here, but some brought their higher renfield aides, or a favored lucy or two, or both-Shadowspawn custom was to have humans about their gatherings, to damp down the primal emotions of their highly territorial breed. She’d heard it compared to control rods in a nuclear reactor. You could usually recognize the lucies by the haunted look in their eyes, and the renfields…well, if you knowingly served evil, it left its mark.
Some of both shot her looks that bordered on hatred. I’m popping their illusions about what they are.
Many of the Shadowspawn inclined their heads deferentially to Adrian, as to a walking legend. He’d killed more of their kind than any other individual in history, with the possible exception of Harvey Ledbetter, which was something that brought profound respect. Ellen surprised herself by feeling a perverse but warm sense of pride in the accomplishment. It wasn’t as if they didn’t deserve it. Or he had any choice.
No, he did have a choice. He could have joined his relatives and been a lord in darkness. He chose to fight for people instead of preying on them.
“Ah, my dear boy, you are in Paris once more!” a voice said.
It was apparently a man in his thirties, and to all appearances corporeal-his eyes were a common Shadowspawn color, very dark brown with yellow-amber flecks, like Adrian’s. In fact he looked very much like Adrian, except that he was dressed in full Edwardian formal turnout, of a rather foppish nature-black swallow-tail coat, double-breasted white piqué waistcoat, white tie, a double strip of black braid down the outside seam of his trousers, pearl and moonstone links and studs, and white kid gloves. A carnation graced the buttonhole.
“Great-great-uncle Arnaud. Not accompanied by thugs and trying to kill me on this occasion?”
Arnaud made an elegant gesture. “It would have been great fun to do so, and then throw your bride down across your corpse and ravish her in some amusing form and drain her, but it was the mere impulse of a moment. Something…told me it would be advisable.”
“Ah, well, no hard feelings, then,” Adrian said, and even Ellen could barely detect the ironic edge.